The clerks turned to humor to kill time as they waited to learn what was going on. One of Powell’s clerks, disturbed by his boss’s memo the day before, drafted a phony opinion and gave it very limited circulation to the clerks’ dining room. “We believe the principle of executive privilege is important…. This case is different from all others that will come before the Court. The Court should be guided by a solicitous concern for the effective discharge of the President’s duties and the dignity of his high office.

“However, we’re deciding this case differently, because Nixon is a crook and somebody ought to throw the son of a bitch in jail.”

Marshall laughed heartily when his clerks showed him a copy. The copies were destroyed for fear that one might fall into the wrong hands.

I think damikesc makes a good point. As a nation we generally accept the authority of the courts (the weakest branch of government) because they are seen for the most part as being impartial. We laugh at Nixon’s infamous claim that if a President does something it’s not illegal because we aspire to live under the rule of law rather than just the rule of men. But when courts act in ways to show that they’re acting more like they’re following their own wishes rather than trying to faithfully apply the rule of law, we get closer and closer to the day when elected officials and ordinary citizens will openly defy their rulings which they have no real power to enforce.

It's ironic that Marshall's law clerk mouthed the usual smear of Nixon as a thief. That was LBJ, the president who nominated Marshall. LBJ was a big time thief. And no doubt the law clerk's hero. Nixon was a lot of things and far from a hero to many on the right, but he didn't enrich himself by way of the political offices he held. How do we know that? If anything, if the tiniest smidgen of evidence of thievery by Nixon had ever come to light it would have been trumpeted by the MSM for months. And it hasn't been. They got nothin'. About LBJ and Barry they got tons. And sit on it.

In fact, it is quite remarkable that "Tricky Dick's" White House gang seems to have been the cleanest in post WWII history in respect of acquiring riches beyond their published salaries, etc.

Even the Nixon papers was a clean deal with no intent to defraud. The deal was entirely legal when it was made, and work on cataloguing the papers, boxing them up, and transferring them to the Federal Gov't immediately got underway. The only hitch was that Mr. Nixon's lawyer did not get around to writing out the deed until the following year, and then the doofus backdated it, instead of starting with "Pursuant to verbal agreement of ....", never dreaming that anyone would question the bona fides of such a distinguished member of the bar as himself.

While we will still have Nixon to kick around from a few more years, the sad reality is that most under-40 folks today have only a vague idea of who he was or why he is the butt of so many jokes. Early generations probably felt the same way about Chester A. Arthur and James A. Garfield.